Belin-Blank Center celebrates two decades of service to international gifted education community

	A student readies the Freedom Flier—an invention that prevents a flag from becoming twisted around the flagpole—at Invent Iowa, an annual statewide convention that draws more than 300 winners of local and regional invention competitions. Invent Iowa was developed by the Belin-Blank Center. Photo by Tim Schoon.

At 34, Katie Porter is an associate professor in the University of Iowa College of Law and a nationally recognized expert on bankruptcy law. Some 20 years earlier, Porter was an Iowa farm girl from a small community south of Winterset, participating in the initial Iowa Governor’s Institute for the Gifted and Talented in 1988.

Porter credits her involvement with the institute—a two-week residential program administered by the University of Iowa Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development—as a critical part of her current success.

“I basked in this experience. I learned that I could do the same science experiments as other gifted kids,” Porter recalls. “Because of programs like the Belin-Blank Center, I had the courage to take the next step with my education when the time came.”

That experience, she says, gave her the confidence to compete alongside peers in a boarding school in 11th and 12th grades.

“I succeeded here, and so I thought, ‘Boarding school will be like that. There will be a lot of other smart kids,’ and I knew the competition wouldn’t cause me to melt,” Porter says. “It took a lot of courage for a 16-year-old kid, a teenager, to pack up and be willing to step into a new set of peers, but to do it as a farm kid from Iowa in a very fancy East Coast boarding school was scary.”

This led her on an Ivy League odyssey to Yale University and Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude and magna cum laude, respectively, with degrees in American studies and a Juris Doctorate.

Like Porter, thousands of gifted students from throughout Iowa, the nation, and the world have benefited from programs, research, and advocacy from the Belin-Blank Center, an affiliate of the UI College of Education that celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer.

“I am so pleased that the Belin-Blank Center now offers programs that go from very young, elementary age, up through college,” Porter says.

Gifted education has changed dramatically over the past two decades, says Susan Assouline, Belin-Blank Center associate director, and the center has helped lead the way. Today more educators understand that supporting high-achieving students is just as important as supporting their lower-achieving peers.

“If students aren’t given the opportunity to be challenged and learn something new, then they become disengaged from their talent and drop out,” Assouline says.

Since its inception, the center has pioneered such opportunities, including academic talent searches designed to discover gifted students; weekend and summer programs on everything from algebra, art, and three-dimensional design to chemistry, creative writing, and LEGO robotics; and the National Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, which provides early admission to the University.

The Belin-Blank Center also developed Invent Iowa, offering a curriculum for teachers who want to help students create inventions. An annual statewide Invention Convention draws more than 300 winners of local and regional competitions—third- through twelfth-grade students with ideas for making life easier. Over the past two decades, approximately 500,000 Iowa students have participated in the program.

The Board of Regents, State of Iowa, created the Belin National Center for Gifted Education at The University of Iowa in June 1988. The center was made possible by a million-dollar endowment that established the Myron and Jacqueline Blank Chair in Gifted Education, one of the nation’s few endowed chairs in gifted education.

In 1995, the center was renamed the Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, honoring a longtime leader in gifted education and a Des Moines philanthropist who has supported the cause.

“The Belin-Blank Center has made a permanent imprint on the landscape of gifted education,” says Nicholas Colangelo, Belin-Blank Center director and the Myron and Jacqueline Blank Chair of Gifted Education since 1989. “It is an advocate trusted by the world gifted community.”

In 2004, the center published “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students.” The report helped move the subject of gifted education and accelerated programs for high-achieving students into the educational mainstream, drawing notice from Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and hundreds of other media venues.

While several other centers across the country focus on gifted education and talent development, the Belin-Blank Center is the most comprehensive, Colangelo says. It’s not just students who are touched and transformed by the center, but teachers, too.

“Professional development has always been our cornerstone,” Assouline says. “One of the exciting things that happened right at the beginning was the endorsement of gifted education training for teachers by the State of Iowa.”

Another major milestone was the joining of the Belin-Blank Center and the University’s Honors Program in the $14 million Blank Honors Center in 2004. In bringing the two programs together, Iowa became one of the nation’s first schools to offer kindergarten-through-college support for gifted students under one roof.

Other achievements include the 2001 debut of the Iowa Advanced Placement Online Academy and the center’s expansion into international gifted education through partnerships with China, India, Israel, Korea, and Mexico.

In addition to the teaching, research, and programming, the center emphasizes giving back to the community—parents, children, educators, and the public. “We know that at the other end of every phone call, there’s a face, there’s a parent, there’s a family,” Assouline says. “We never forget that.”

One such face is Anastasia Bassis, a student in the UI Carver College of Medicine from Newton, Iowa. Bassis attended the Belin-Blank Center Iowa Summer Institute when she was 13, and she was also admitted early to The University of Iowa through the Belin-Blank Center’s National Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. She credits the center for being both “a foundation and a springboard” throughout her academic career.

“I think it is crucial for talented and gifted children to receive encouragement in choosing nontraditional paths,” Bassis says. “The advantage of Belin-Blank is that the staff is willing to work with each student individually to access his or her specific interests and needs. They provide unique, unconventional opportunities and a supportive environment to further whatever goals a student might have.”

by Lois J. Gray